A grandmother from Chicago, she’s one of those people who knows everybody. And those people who know everybody, the connectors, make the world work. A study of the power of (offline) social networking.

When Conan O’Brien left NBC, he agreed to stay off TV for months and stay quiet about the network and its executives. The agreement contained no mention of social media, however. On the origins of a digital renaissance.

Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity; when will our minds meld with the machine?

A requiem for the ‘content portal’ era.

From the Greeks to George Lucas, 2,200 years of failure.

On the group of friends who came to rule the bizarre, decreasingly lucrative world of Internet porn.

“I’m not the kind of guy who hears voices. But that night, as I passed the station, I heard a little voice coming from the back of my head…‘If you do it that way, if you use that algorithm, there will be a flaw. The game will be flawed. You will be able to crack the ticket. You will be able to plunder the lottery.’”

How a legally dubious FBI sting lured a pair of Russian hackers stateside.

How YouTube went from ubiquitous to profitable; and where it goes next.

A remembrance of relationships formed when the author, at 13 and using a false identity, frequented hockey chat rooms.

A profile of Jobs. The themes: immortality, relinquishing control, and how being adopted affected his choices for Apple. The lede: “One day, Steve Jobs is going to die.”

Fifteen years ago, Sherry Turkle developed a little crush on a robot named Cog. Since then, the MIT professor has been studying our ever-increasing emotional reliance on technology. She’s not optimistic about where we’re headed.

How the social networks that popped up in Facebook’s absence—the site is not available behind the Great Firewall—are changing Chinese culture.

The backstory on Julian Assange’s relationship with the Guardian and the New York Times.

The new purgatory; what becomes of digital identities after death.

On how 21st century culture shifts killed the nerd and what lies ahead.

On the (disputed) origins of the Huffington Post.

A profile of video game artist Shigeru Miyamoto, the man behind Super Mario Bros.

On boot camps designed to break kids of their web addiction.

A tech neophyte looks for answers in Silicon Valley, “the last place in America where people are this optimistic.”

Inside the world of competitive coding.

Where the actual online money is centralized, and where Google will have to go to continue chasing it.

What happened to the minds behind Napster, Gnutella, WinAmp, and BitTorrent after their creations irrevocably changed business and culture.

The prosecutor in the case of hacker turned F.B.I. informant (but still hacker) Albert Gonzales and his organization Shadowcrew : “The sheer extent of the human victimization caused by Gonzalez and his organization is unparalleled.”

The perpetually underpaid author takes a moonlighting job with Demand Media, publisher of search-engine optimized articles with titles like “Hair Styles for Women Over 50 With Glasses”, absurdity ensues.